Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [46]
At the close of the convention, Bates delivered the final speech. No complete record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters, Weed confessed, were “too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of Reporting.” “No account that can now be given will do it justice,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune the following week. In clear, compelling language, Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad “between sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity.” He called on the various regions of the nation to speak in “voices of moderation and compromise, for only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness.” While he was speaking, Weed reported, “he was interrupted continually by cheer upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the thousands in attendance.” Overwhelmed by the reaction, Bates considered the speech “the crowning act” of his life, received as he “never knew a speech received before.”
“The immense assembly,” Bates noted in his diary, “seemed absolutely mesmerized—their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity. And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness again.”
Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been “flattered,” his “pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have withdrawn.” The experience was “more full of public honor & private gratification than any passage of my life…those three days at Chicago have given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of Congress.”
With that single speech, Bates had become a prominent national figure, his name heralded in papers across the country as a leading prospect for high public office once the Whigs were returned to power. “The nation cannot afford to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism,” Weed concluded at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political life.
While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention’s close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called “the glittering bauble” of political success. Declining Weed’s appeal that he return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed to Weed, he had entertained such “noble aspirations” to make his mind “the mind of other men.” But these desires were now gone, his “habits formed and stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life.” Consequently, there was “no office in the gift of prince or people” that he would accept. His refusal, he explained, was “the natural result” of his social position, his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.
SEWARD WAS NEXT to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years of practicing law that he “had no ambition for its honors.” Though resigned to his profession “with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never suspected,” he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case. He was discovering, he said, that “politics was the important and engrossing business of the country.”
Fate provided an introduction to Thurlow Weed, the man who would secure his entry into the political world and facilitate his rise to prominence. Seward was on an excursion to Niagara Falls with Frances, her father, and his parents when the wheel of their stagecoach broke off,